With less than six months gone in the year, the parish of St James has already record­ed more than 100 mur­ders, police sta­tis­tics have revealed.

Following a year when the parish saw more than 210 mur­ders, the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s (JCF) lat­est Periodic Serious and Violent Crime Review shows that 103 per­sons have been report­ed killed in St James between January 1 and last weekend.

This is a 27 per cent jump when com­pared with the 81 mur­ders record­ed in St James over the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od last year.

This devel­op­ment comes near­ly one year after more than 200 addi­tion­al police per­son­nel were deployed to the parish to stem the ris­ing crime rate.

According to the JCF sta­tis­tics, St James is one of sev­en police divi­sions that have report­ed increased mur­ders so far this year. The oth­ers are St Ann, which saw a 39 per cent jump; St Mary, which report­ed a 25 per cent increase; Clarendon, which had a 23 per cent jump; Trelawny, which record­ed a 13 per cent increase; St Andrew Central, which had a four per cent increase; and Westmoreland, which record­ed a three per cent increase.

Despite this, the data show that there has been a two per cent decline nation­al­ly in the num­ber of per­sons report­ed killed.

It shows that 492 mur­ders have been record­ed across all 19 police divi­sions, 10 few­er than the 502 record­ed for the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od last year.

Except for shoot­ings, which inched up by five per cent, the JCF sta­tis­tics also show that all oth­er cat­e­gories of seri­ous and vio­lent crime have decreased by between 18 and 40 per cent.

National Security Minister Robert Montague said Police Commissioner Dr Carl Williams and his team should be cred­it­ed for the fall-off in seri­ous crimes but cau­tioned against com­pla­cen­cy. Read more here: http://​jamaica​glean​er​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​l​e​a​d​-​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​/​2​0​1​6​0​6​0​8​/​m​u​r​d​e​r​s​-​s​p​i​k​e​-​s​t​-​j​a​m​e​s​-​w​e​s​t​e​r​n​-​p​a​r​i​s​h​-​s​e​e​s​-​i​n​c​r​e​a​s​e​-​k​i​l​l​i​n​g​s​-​d​e​s​p​ite

Since Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced that he would be seeking to make changes to the Bail Act at least as it relates to some murders there has been uproar coming from Criminal Defense Lawyers and the long line of people who actively support criminality from behind the cover of legitimate human rights advocacy .

As a sin­gle medi­um this Blog has not been silent on the issue of crime in Jamaica and the crip­pling effect it has had, and is hav­ing on the abil­i­ty of our coun­try to lift itself out of pover­ty and take it’s place as an emerg­ing first world country.
In a recent inter­view giv­en to the Jamaican press Andrew Holness reit­er­at­ed that he was not seek­ing to set up a con­fronta­tion with those opposed to fix­ing the bail act.
The ques­tion­er Ian Boyne asked the Prime Minister what his response would be to those crim­i­nal Lawyers, and human rights lob­by­ists who say he is not a lawyer and as such should leave mat­ters like that alone because it would be unconstitutional?
Holness laid out a nuanced approach which he inti­mat­ed would includ­ed dia­logue with stakeholders.

I dis­agree whole­heart­ed­ly with that approach . There are no stake­hold­ers but the Jamaican peo­ple, the vul­tures who pass as crim­i­nal defense lawyers have had it their way for decades, it’s now time for ordi­nary Jamaicans to take their coun­try back.
Needless to say I believe there are enough guar­an­tees with­in the sys­tem which already gives crim­i­nal accused enough pro­tec­tion under the law >
It is time that as a nation we focus on the pro­tec­tion of the inno­cent being slaugh­tered, instead of per­pet­u­al­ly design­ing poli­cies to accom­mo­date criminals..
Our coun­try does not belong to the crim­i­nal lawyers who pose as offi­cers of the courts but are in many regards active crim­i­nals themselves.

They can no longer be allowed to have a monop­oly on the direc­tion and con­tent of leg­is­la­tion. If the law does not suit the peo­ple then the law is a shack­le and should be discarded.
The very lawyers who tout the law and our Constitution are some of the most egre­gious offend­ers of said laws.
It’s impor­tant to remind them that the Bail Act was made into law at a time when our coun­try was not record­ing up to in excess of 1600 dead Jamaicans each year.
On that basis alone the Bail Act has become obso­lete and should be revis­it­ed as is the case with much of the penal code.
For over four decades our coun­try has been dom­i­nat­ed by arro­gant left­ist lawyers, now they are joined by the nev­er end­ing list of crim­i­nal sup­port­ing groups who hide under the ban­ner of human rights to sup­port crim­i­nal activ­i­ty on the Island.
The very peo­ple whom many Jamaicans allowed into their lives believ­ing they were gen­uine advo­cates for change despite our warn­ings, showed their hands when they dis­trib­uted homo­sex­u­al and oth­er sex­u­al­ly explic­it mate­ri­als to their children.
Most Jamaicans know that these groups are active­ly enhanc­ing and sup­port­ing the very peo­ple who are killing and rap­ing at will in the communities.
lawyers do not care about crime they get paid by criminals.
Human rights lob­by­ists have no rel­e­vance with­out criminals .
Why would we con­tin­ue to have these two groups decide whether we change our laws to make them com­men­su­rate with the chal­lenges of the times?

Every year many of the Island’s Lawyers are dis­barred from prac­tic­ing law, in some cas­es it takes sev­er­al dif­fer­ent com­plaints of ille­gal and crim­i­nal con­duct to have them removed.
Below is a list of the dis­barred Attorneys According to the General legal Counsel’s own web­site, this list rep­re­sents just those who are caught . It is impor­tant to note that while we hold up the pri­vate bar to a stan­dard they do not deserve and the Bench to saint­hood it is impor­tant to rec­og­nize that they all come from the very same fra­ter­ni­ty as these who got kicked out .
Many Jamaicans liv­ing abroad have been fleeced of their entire life sav­ings by lawyers who are still prac­tic­ing as we speak .The last thing we need is to con­tin­ue to acqui­esce to the demands of lawyers.

The rampant murder in Jamaica is so severe that making mention of a particular case or writing about a single instance seem discriminatory and unmindful of the fact that the taking of each and every life is the same in God’s sight.

No life is more impor­tant than the oth­er , as a for­mer street cop I know this all too well , I saw the dead bod­ies in the slums and I saw them in the upscale neigh­bor­hoods of upper upper Saint Andrew.

Despite my pol­i­cy of not treat­ing any death as more impor­tant than anoth­er, I some­times break with that tra­di­tion to speak specif­i­cal­ly on a par­tic­u­lar killing not because the par­tic­u­lar decedent/​s life is more valu­able than that of oth­ers but because of the cir­cum­stances of their indi­vid­ual demise.
There is much talk regard­ing the com­plex­i­ties of the Island’s crime sit­u­a­tion . If you lis­ten to the Police Commissioner you would walk away with a shrug, because you would be utter­ly con­vinced that the only peo­ple who are being killed on the Island are peo­ple engaged in the lotto-scam.
Whether or not the peo­ple being mur­dered are lot­to-scam­mers and their affil­i­ates would cer­tain­ly not change the fact that the Island is expe­ri­enc­ing astro­nom­i­cal­ly high homi­cide rates which places it at or near the top of the world’s most mur­der­ous nations.
Using the met­ric I pre­vi­ous­ly out­lined those killing should offer no com­fort to any­one seri­ous­ly plugged into whats hap­pen­ing on the Island as it relates to crime.
A dead lot­to-scam­mer is a dead Jamaican, a dead gang mem­ber is a dead Jamaican. We should see the pars­ing of deaths, ” because of this or because of that” as a sign that they have no answers for the exist­ing prob­lems. Or they have the answers but their hands are tied.

The Jamaican peo­ple have the answer to crime they obsti­nate­ly refuse to use it .They have allowed a small sub-set of peo­ple to tell them how mur­der­ers are to be treated.
(1) You can’t hang them ! Privy Council…
(2) You can shoot them ! (pha­lanx of human rights eat a food-ers)
(3) Police can­not shoot them! INDECOM , also see #2
(4) Can’t jail them for life and throw the keys away! Trial lawyers and oth­er bleed­ing hearts.
Hug them up, Yaaaaa.…

Jamaica’s Crime Not Rooted In The Ghettos.…

As a for­mer police offi­cer I have seen first hand the con­se­quence of crime on our coun­try . If you decide to look at the killings as the Police high com­mand has done and remove the gang killings and those sup­pos­ed­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the lot­to-scam you may extrap­o­late from the remain­der of those sta­tis­tics that the sec­tor tak­ing the brunt of the killings is the small busi­ness sector.
In may cas­es , (accord­ing to my sources ) those mur­ders are a direct result of the ram­pant extor­tion rack­et on the Island .
On the oth­er hand many of the peo­ple who pass as legit­i­mate busi­ness peo­ple are actu­al­ly heav­i­ly involved in seri­ous crimes, as I wrote just last week.

Over the last two to three decades over thir­ty thou­sand Jamaicans have been mur­dered by some esti­mates . It is impor­tant that those sta­tis­tics are digest­ed in the con­text that the Island is not engaged in a civ­il war, and that the pop­u­la­tion is only 2.8 million.
On Monday night two more Jamaicans lost their lives in a hail of gun­fire . According to Police Fifty-eight-year-old Andrew Davis and 50-year-old Helen McGoo were shot mul­ti­ple times as they sat inside their car, just after clos­ing their bill pay­ment and lot­tery tick­et busi­ness about 7:45 pm. The two were approached by a gun­man who opened fire at them. They were rushed to the hos­pi­tal where they were pro­nounced dead. The police has ruled out rob­bery as a motive as noth­ing was tak­en from the couple.

Jamaica’s crime prob­lem invari­ably will get far worse before it gets bet­ter. As long as the Nation’s leg­is­la­tion and law-enforce­ment is heav­i­ly influ­enced by Criminal trail-lawyers, bleed­ing heart crim­i­nal sym­pa­thiz­ers and the social­ist intel­li­gentsia which has it’s head so far up it’s own ass it can­not smell the shit.
The prob­lem of crime will not be fixed because many law-mak­ers dou­ble as defense lawyers, who active­ly defend mur­der­ous crim­i­nals then walk into the Nation’s par­lia­ment to debate laws. If we are to fix the crime prob­lem we must throw out the entire shit-house and not just the shit.
Jamaica is a coun­try where some of the peo­ple in pol­i­tics on both sides of the polit­i­cal divide are active­ly engaged in crim­i­nal conduct.

As long as the Island’s jus­tice sys­tem is pop­u­lat­ed with Judges , pros­e­cu­tors and defense lawyers who came from the same left­ist bas­tion in Mona St Andrew crime will con­tin­ue. As long as the Jamaican peo­ple allow a select few to decide what is right for them while they who decide live in gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties which are ade­quate­ly policed and pro­tect­ed by armed pri­vate secu­ri­ty com­pa­nies blood will con­tin­ue to stain the side­walks and street corners.
Ordinary Jamaicans must pre­pare to come out with their water-hoses and push brooms and con­tin­ue to wash away the blood and the brain mat­ter of their loved ones from the pave­ments and street cor­ners across the Island.
Ask your­selves why they refuse to fix the police depart­ment? Placing a PhD at the head of a decrepit paper tiger is not mod­ern­iz­ing the police department.
Creating an antag­o­nis­tic anti-police agency to fight with the police must be seen for the smoke-screen it is. If the police can­not do it’s job because of low morale and per­se­cu­tion the polit­i­cal class has free rein to con­tin­ue to raid the pub­lic cof­fers unchecked ‚who is to hold them accountable?
The police ser­vice can­not be a real police ser­vice unless it is free from the shack­les of polit­i­cal con­trol, polit­i­cal dic­tates, polit­i­cal manip­u­la­tion regard­less of what you are told.
When the polit­i­cal class and those who live above Cross-Roads are locked away in jail for their crimes it will be time for us to say we are mak­ing progress as a nation.
Until then they are blow­ing smoke up your ass.

In his con­tri­bu­tion to the bud­get debate of 2016 Prime Minister Holness rather briefly spoke to the issue of crime toward the end of his presentation .
In brief the Prime Minister indi­cat­ed that his Administration is con­sid­er­ing revis­it­ing the bail act, with a view to pre­vent­ing some per­sons charged with mur­der form receiv­ing bail.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​p​r​i​m​e​-​m​i​n​i​s​t​e​r​s​-​p​r​e​s​e​n​t​a​t​i​o​n​-​b​r​e​a​t​h​-​f​r​e​s​h​-​a​ir/

Frankly I would per­son­al­ly have liked to see the Prime Minister inform him­self more on this issue. I would also have pre­ferred that he spent more time speak­ing to the ques­tion of crime, and in par­tic­u­lar use his high office to edu­cate the pub­lic and his col­leagues on the oppo­si­tion side of the isle on the debil­i­tat­ing effect crime is hav­ing on the country.

In a recent arti­cle I wrote I laid out some straight for­ward facts which shows that for many on the Island crime means mak­ing a liv­ing. People now depend on death to put their pots on fire, more deaths mean more food.
The nation has lost it’s abil­i­ty to appre­ci­ate the val­ue and the sanc­ti­ty of life . Countless years of inor­di­nate­ly high cost of the most basic neces­si­ties have numbed the peo­ple’s abil­i­ty to care, it’s every man for himself.
One per­son said to me the oth­er day Jamaicans now laugh at a pass­ing hearse, not lament­ing that anoth­er of their neigh­bor has met his/​her demise, but admir­ing­ly query (a who mek dat de dup­py) who killed the deceased ?

It’s as if the nation is devoid of soul, the con­stant killings are not cause for con­cern but rea­sons for cel­e­bra­tion, occa­sions to dress up and par­ty . From the car­pen­ter to the mason to the under­tak­er the bands­men to the sound sys­tem and all ven­dors in between , every­one eats from the car­cass­es of the dead like vul­tures tear­ing at the pun­gent decay­ing car­cass­es, while every­one else cov­ers their noses at the stench and the utter mor­bid­ness of it all.
These are the chil­dren of aus­ter­i­ty, the gen­er­a­tion of viper Raymond Wislon the head of the police union referenced.
What else did we expect?

Someone asked me years ago how could Palestinians blow them­selves up to make a point , how could they destroy their own lives?
I asked him whether he was aware that the peo­ple destroy­ing their lives are chil­dren who grew up under the boot-heels of Israeli occupation?
That they had no con­cept of life out­side despair, anger, revenge, and mar­tyr­dom, to them life is dif­fer­ent than those of their Israeli neigh­bors on the oth­er side of the fence.
The dif­fer­ences are as stark as the dif­fer­ence between night and day.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​d​e​a​t​h​-​b​u​s​i​n​e​s​s​-​j​a​m​a​i​c​a​-​m​a​y​b​e​-​p​e​o​p​l​e​-​n​o​t​-​w​a​n​t​-​e​n​d​-​c​r​i​me/

At the time Holness promised to revis­it the bail act I knew that there would be blow-back from the usu­al quar­ters. After all this is Jamaica we are talk­ing about, this is the place where every tom , dick and har­ry has an opin­ion about every­thing even if they have no idea how it affects them one way or the other.
What I did not know is exact­ly where the first bunch of lib­er­al hot air would come from first?
Would it come from the dumb sheep whose fam­i­ly mem­bers are get­ting slaugh­tered while they cel­e­brate the butchers?

Would it be from the politi­cians who sit in the Nation’s par­lia­ment only because the peo­ple who live in the con­stituen­cy they rep­re­sent are real­ly are trib­al cultists who look for gov­ern­ment largess to sur­vive? The kind of largess which keep them sub­ju­gat­ed and depen­dent unable to think out­side their parochial exis­tence, anoth­er kind of slave plantation?
Or would it come from the Criminal defense Lawyers , many of who are active crim­i­nals them­selves and many more active­ly enhanc­ing the process of crim­i­nal­i­ty on the island?
Would it come from the hal­lowed halls of the Intellectual ghet­to where the edu­cat­ed are the lib­er­al­ly slant­ed ide­o­logues who make up much, if not all of nation­al life?
Would it come from the busi­ness sec­tor which thrives on the blood-let­ting , or would it be the pletho­ra of bleed­ing heart par­a­sites lin­ing up sup­pos­ed­ly in defense of the poor and dis­pos­sessed under the ban­ner of human rights , as long of course as they can eat a food?

I believe this time it was the very vul­tures who pre­tend to defend the free­doms of the inno­cent, even as they ignore the dai­ly slaugh­ter of the inno­cent, the defense­less, the elder­ly and those so young they are unable to pro­tect themselves.
Nothing else mat­ters as long as they are paid.
It came as no sur­prise that the noble con­cept of pub­lic ser­vice is lost on them. The very ser­vice police offi­cers , fire­men, teach­ers, doc­tors and oth­ers freely give.
It is impor­tant that as one pon­der crime and what sus­tains it that we rec­og­nize remark­ably that though the fix is in the peo­ple’s grasp they con­tin­ue to hand the knife to the per­son doing the stabbing.
Where there is no vision the peo­ple sure­ly perish.

As was expect­ed, mem­bers of the pri­vate Bar have come out swing­ing against Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s announce­ment of the Government’s inten­tion to have the Bail Act amended.

Mr Holness made the dis­clo­sure in his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion on Tuesday, but did not elab­o­rate, stat­ing only that the inten­tion was for an amend­ment to the act “such that per­sons charged with mur­der will be inel­i­gi­ble for bail under cer­tain circumstances”.

Without details of the Government’s pro­pos­al, we are unable to give our view one way or the oth­er. However, read­ers of this col­umn will know that we have often argued the point that bail is too eas­i­ly grant­ed to some accused indi­vid­u­als and that there needs to be a review of the law.

We can­not for­get the bru­tal mur­der of Special Constable Troy Foster in Malvern, St Elizabeth, in January 2013 by gun­men who engaged a police patrol in the town.

After the shoot­ing, it emerged that one of the gun­men — Tyrone Edmond, who was also shot dead in that encounter — was out on bail, hav­ing been charged with the mur­der of 60-year-old pen­sion­er, Mr Cecil Bennett in Top Hill, St Elizabeth, in 2010.

We also remem­ber very well that in August 2012 one of the three sus­pects held for the cold-blood­ed mur­der of 26-year-old used car deal­er Mr Michael Rochester was on bail. The sus­pect, the police report­ed, was fac­ing charges of mur­der and shoot­ing with intent.

There have been myr­i­ad cas­es in which offend­ers on bail have com­mit­ted seri­ous crimes, includ­ing mur­der. Indeed, one infa­mous gang leader, who was arrest­ed and charged for a triple mur­der, was released on bail only to be arrest­ed again and charged with a fourth mur­der three months lat­er. But, sur­pris­ing­ly, he was grant­ed bail again.

After all that, who can blame the police and indeed pub­lic pros­e­cu­tors for feel­ing frus­trat­ed? Indeed, the police have often lament­ed that the ease with which some accused indi­vid­u­als are grant­ed bail is hob­bling their crime-fight­ing efforts.

We recall some years ago Assistant Commissioner of Police Wray Palmer express­ing a desire on behalf of the Police Officers’ Association that the courts review the admin­is­tra­tion of bail.

“We need to con­sid­er the free­dom of a vio­lent crim­i­nal ver­sus the secu­ri­ty of the nation,” Mr Palmer said at the time.

It is a view that was shared by for­mer Prime Minister PJ Patterson who, in 2005, called for a review of the pol­i­cy gov­ern­ing bail.

“There are too many cas­es of too may per­sons who have been bailed intim­i­dat­ing wit­ness­es or com­mit­ting oth­er offences,” Mr Patterson told senior jour­nal­ists at a Jamaica House news briefing.

This prob­lem, we note, is not unique to Jamaica for, in October 2012, British news­pa­pers pub­lished Government data show­ing that every 10 days a mur­der is com­mit­ted in Great Britain by offend­ers on bail.

According to those sta­tis­tics, at least 37 crim­i­nals were con­vict­ed of mur­der while on bail for anoth­er offence in the year 2011 — an aver­age of three every month.

In addi­tion, the data showed that in 2011, a total of 65,627 crim­i­nals were con­vict­ed for a new offence they had com­mit­ted while on bail.

While the fig­ures here in Jamaica are not as fright­en­ing, we can­not ignore the real­i­ty to which they speak.

Jamaica needs to get to the point where the prin­ci­ples of jus­tice and the rights of indi­vid­u­als are observed, while the safe­ty of the com­mu­ni­ty is protected.
http://​www​.jamaicaob​serv​er​.com/​e​d​i​t​o​r​i​a​l​/​T​h​e​r​e​-​i​s​-​n​e​e​d​-​f​o​r​-​a​-​t​o​u​g​h​e​r​-​B​a​i​l​-​A​c​t​_​6​2​193

As Prime Minister Holness seek to begin the process of dealing with the existential threat crime poses to Jamaica it cannot be lost on him that pretty much everything in Jamaica is a top-down affair.
Crime being no different has at it’s source , well placed powerful people who will fight tooth and nail to ensure that the monster is never tamed.

It is impor­tant to con­tem­plate the con­tin­ued growth of crime with­in those para­me­ters. If the pow­er­ful inter­est groups were inter­est­ed in Jamaica being crime-free I would not be writ­ing this blog.
One of the under­ly­ing prob­lem with­in the Criminal jus­tice sys­tem as I read it recent­ly is that the Island can­not find enough good lawyers will­ing to serve as judges.
The pri­ma­ry argu­ments com­ing out of lawyers polled is that the mon­ey is not good enough.
Remarkably, what jumped out at me was the self­ish­ness of the lawyers who respond­ed to the media query, not a sin­gle one felt the need to give back to their coun­try through pub­lic service.

Most coun­tries look­ing to devel­op a strong bench which will look out for the inter­est of the peo­ple, farm their judges from the pros­e­cu­tion side of the Isle.
In Jamaica they do not do that they source Judges from the pri­vate bar.
Is there any won­der that the Prosecutors have such a dif­fi­cult time gain­ing a con­vic­tion in the courts which give rad­i­cal new mean­ing to the term “crim­i­nal courts”?

There is a huge sub-set of the Jamaican pop­u­la­tion which has seri­ous fidu­cia­ry inter­est in the pro­lif­er­a­tion and pro­mul­ga­tion of crime.
Transparency International’s report­ing on this is quite illu­mi­nat­ing.( no pun intend­ed).
Whether it is the pha­lanx of sup­posed human rights lob­by­ists or the crim­i­nal defense lawyers, whether it’s the well placed upper Saint Andrew crowd who employ the con­tract killers, or the new breed which final­ly got exposed to a lit­tle edu­ca­tion at the hal­lowed left­ist halls of the intel­lec­tu­al ghet­to, they are equal­ly opposed to seri­ous laws against criminals.

Some of those who seem most respectable in the busi­ness world are the worst crim­i­nal offend­ers yet, they make mil­lions and none are the wis­er to their lives of crime. Largely because of the incom­pe­tence of the Police Department and the inabil­i­ty of the “crim­i­nal courts sys­tem” to pros­e­cute peo­ple with yel­low col­or and curly hair.
Damn, it is so bad the sys­tem even refused to seri­ous­ly con­sid­er a clear cut crim­i­nal com­plaint against kinky-haired Kern Spencer , and he does­n’t have curly-hair nor yel­low skin.

Many years ago while I was young detec­tive aide at the Constant Spring CIB a man I had nev­er seen came to the office and report­ed that he brought into the coun­try a con­tain­er load of toys which he sourced out to a cer­tain man whose fam­i­ly name is a sta­ple in busi­ness cir­cles around the country.
As many Jamaicans are well aware some peo­ple are untouch­able at least as far as the Jamaican police are concerned.
The gen­tle­man in ques­tion was sent to me in per­son as he was at his wits end, unable to col­lect a cent for his entire con­tain­er load of toys from the par­tic­u­lar well placed, well con­nect­ed businessman.
After sit­ting him down and doing an inter­view I real­ized that he was not Jamaican even though he loved our coun­try. Unfortunately for him the per­son who was hold­ing his prop­er­ty knew he was in the coun­try illegally(overstayed his per­mit) and was pre­pared to exploit that to it’s fullest.

After tak­ing his affi­davit I con­tem­plat­ed my actions going for­ward, if the busi­ness man hold­ing his prop­er­ty took respon­si­bil­i­ty that he owes the enor­mous sum of mon­ey to the com­plainant, it becomes a civ­il mat­ter there is no more action that I as a police offi­cer could take , he would need a lawyer to sue to recov­er his prop­er­ty, or be finan­cial­ly compensated .
For a Jamaican in a sim­i­lar predica­ment that’s a daunt­ing prospect, he would like­ly die before the courts arrived at a resolution.
For a for­eign­er he could for all intents and pur­pos­es kiss his mon­ey good­bye and the busi­ness man was well aware of this.

I decid­ed to pay him a hail-Mary vis­it(long-shot), with me was my good­ly part­ner Dadrick Henry.
Dadrick Henry and I had a good-cop, bad cop thing going . I would lead with the pleas­antries and if needs be Dadrick would show the bad cop per­sona. It worked won­ders for us.
We sat in our car the morn­ing stak­ing out his store in one of the many plazas on Constant Spring Road with us was the com­plainant. I want­ed to get his reac­tion to the com­plainant when we walked into his office, the very rea­son he decid­ed not to pay the debt may be the very best thing I had going for my plan of get­ting him to say he does not intend to pay for the mer­chan­dise in which case his hold­ing them with­out pay­ing for them would amount to a crime.

We wait­ed only about 10 min­utes after which he drove up in his spank­ing new BMW auto­mo­bile and went to the upper lev­el of the two floor strip mall in which his busi­ness was located.
We gave him an addi­tion­al ten min­utes to get set­tled and with audio tape turned on in my coat pock­et we entered his office and iden­ti­fied ourselves.
He was extreme­ly cour­te­ous and accom­mo­dat­ing. To this day I believe he thought he would sim­ply pla­cate us then drop us a twen­ty dol­lar for lunch and that would have been the end of the mat­ter. Over-con­fi­dence, Arrogance, and high-mind­ed­ness did him in.
Wrong cop!

He gra­cious­ly offered us a seat upon which he closed his office door, he there­after went on to school me in the law gov­ern­ing ille­gal immi­grants and end­ed con­fi­dent­ly by telling me that the ille­gal immi­gra­tion sta­tus of the com­plainant gives him the right not to pay him a red cent.
Ah yes “if fish would sim­ply shut it’s mouth he would­n’t get caught with a hook” my great aunt always said.
I got what I came for those with whom I served know I rel­ished tak­ing down these big fish.
All true but I was not in his office as an immi­gra­tion offi­cer. I was not an Immigration offi­cer, I was there with a view to deter­min­ing whether or not a crime was com­mit­ted and yes he did com­mit a crime.
I got up from my seat and thanked him for his hos­pi­tal­i­ty , then I told him Mister ******* you are under arrest for fraud­u­lent con­ver­sion place your hands behind your back right now”.
In two shakes of a cat’s tail I had him cuffed he was in absolute shock , how could this hap­pen peo­ple like them do not get placed in handcuffs?
He begged to be allowed to call one of his employ­ees I allowed it . The look on the face of his well coiffed uni­formed employ­ee when she walked in was priceless.
He instruct­ed her to call his fam­i­ly mem­bers , which I also allowed , the com­plainant want­ed his mon­ey not a dragged out court case.

In a few min­utes the office was filled with fam­i­ly mem­bers , every­one clutch­ing their pearls at what had just occurred. ” Gasp” please keep this between us , please do not allow this to get to the media”.
Me ? this is all in your hands and you bet­ter be quick about it. In less than a half of an hour the com­plainant received every cent of his two hun­dred thou­sand dollars.
In the late 80’s that was a hell of a lot of money.

One thing about this skin­ny lit­tle detec­tive was that no one was above the laws in my book .
The thanks and offers of a com­pen­sa­tion com­ing from the grate­ful com­plainant was solace for a job well done.
We declined !!!

Seeing the reac­tion on the offend­er and his fam­i­ly mem­bers faces was worth more than gold to us.
No one was above the law in my book , as a police offi­cer I nev­er cared who broke the law , if the evi­dence leads to you , you are going to jail.
Yes that brought a cer­tain noter­i­ty which got me in the cross-hairs of the polit­i­cal class and when they chose to they trans­ferred me for a shoot­ing I was­n’t even involved in , on a night I was­n’t even at work. Now you under­stand my undy­ing affec­tion for the police hier­ar­chy [sic]
In the end the peo­ple spoke and the feck­less police high com­mand had no choice but to return me to where they trans­ferred me from.
I loved being the peo­ple’s cop.

I learned a long time ago that s**t does not flow upstream. Crime in Jamaica has pow­er­ful sponsors .
Maybe one day I will write a book, I had a great time serv­ing the Jamaican people.

Yesterday I wrote about the risk to which younger members of the Jamaican Police force are being exposed because of the systematic failure of the gazetted ranks. I had some pretty awesome feed back on that blog.
One of the uplifting thing about the responses I received was that they came from former colleagues, people who actually understood in a real way what exactly we are talking about because they lived those very same experiences.
Actors in speaking after receiving their academy awards always pay homage to the people who go out and watch their movies but they are particularly moved that the recognition came from the Academy which is made of their peers, people who knows what it takes for them to bring the characters they play to life.
So too is articulating an argument in support for the rule of law and policing and being supported by others who have experienced what you have experienced , face the guns and even been shot.
You are mindful of the people who empathize with your point of view but the only people who truly can say I totally get what you are saying are your former comrades.

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​m​a​k​e​-​d​a​m​n​-​a​r​r​e​s​t​-​a​u​t​h​o​r​i​ty/

In the same breadth I total­ly under­stand how some peo­ple can see noth­ing redemp­tive about police offi­cers or the job they do when all of their expe­ri­ences with offi­cers neg­a­tive , all of what they hear are neg­a­tive .The inces­sant neg­a­tive imagery of offi­cers mak­ing an ugly arrest , or forced to use lethal force is not some­thing which engen­ders mushy feel­ings towards officers.
The inci­dents where an offi­cer steps um and risks his life for a total stranger is nev­er doc­u­ment­ed those nev­er make the news.
On the fate­ful night I was shot on Blackwood Terrace in Kingston 8 I did not go there because I want­ed to hang out . I went there because a man I had nev­er seen report­ed a threat against his life and so we accom­pa­nied him home after tak­ing his report.
He failed to tell me the full sto­ry ‚had he been up front with me I assure you I would not have tak­en a bul­let that night and nei­ther would he.
Instead he divulged what he deemed expe­di­ent, it almost cost us both our lives.
Those sto­ries sel­dom ever gets told , yet they hap­pen every day.
It’s easy to miss the impor­tant work offi­cers do which allows peo­ple to do what they do and get on with their lives. In a coun­try like ours with all of the forces com­pet­ing for the stage of denounce­ment, it is dou­bly dif­fi­cult to find empa­thy for those who run toward the bul­lets when every­one runs for cover.

Following on what I wrote yes­ter­day I want to fol­low up with with a short syn­op­sis of what I believe is a pat­tern of sys­tem­at­ic fail­ure of the rank and file by mem­bers of the gazetted ranks. For the casu­al observ­er the mem­bers of the force who are above the rank of Inspector up to the Commissioner of police are mem­bers of the gazetted ranks .
(They are con­sid­ered civ­il ser­vants ) They are the offi­cers who wear the kha­ki-col­ored uni­forms and the black caps. Inspectors wear the kha­ki-col­ored uni­forms but wear the cap with the red band around it like the reg­u­lar cops. The Inspector Rank is by and large the bridge between the foot sol­diers and the Gazetted civ­il ser­vice officers.

As the police force has suf­fered scathing crit­i­cisms over the decades there is a cer­tain pre­dis­po­si­tion on the part of the Jamaican pop­u­lace to be for­giv­ing or even def­er­en­tial to the gazetted ranks of the force while lev­el­ing the most blis­ter­ing assault against the low­er ranks.
This par­tic­u­lar def­er­ence may very well be a part of the Jamaican cul­ture to be def­er­en­tial to peo­ple with pow­er (the big man culture).
Members of the gazetted ranks are not labeled (police bway) They are ref­er­eed to as (Supe or Boss”. They are nev­er labelled (jankru, duty police bway, licky- licky police ) you catch my drift !
Yet I have nev­er seen s**t flow upstream.

When a team fail it is always the fail­ure of lead­er­ship which must be held to account. Some say well what about not hav­ing the right players?
The quick answer to that ques­tion is who chose the play­ers? It is always a fail­ure of lead­er­ship when things go wrong . The Jamaica Constabulary Force is a case study in that sys­tem­at­ic fail­ure of leadership.

The com­mon excuse on the part of politi­cians of both polit­i­cal stripes is that what­ev­er ails the Jamaican soci­ety is the fault of the police.
The com­mon excuse on the part of the gazetted ranks of the JCF is that what­ev­er ails the soci­ety is the fault of the rank and file, not theirs.
It’s a clas­sic case of the tail wag­ging the dog syn­drome . Lets be clear there are sys­tem­at­ic and struc­tur­al prob­lems plagu­ing the police depart­ment which need finan­cial resources , how­ev­er some of those prob­lems may be addressed with a dis­ci­plined com­mon sense approach which include lead­er­ship , account­abil­i­ty and goal-ori­en­ta­tion, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly money.

(1)THE DEPARTMENT CAN START AT THE BEGINNING. 
The depart­ment sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dropped the ball for years on antecedent reports. Rather than cre­ate a cadre of offi­cers who have top clear­ance to go out and deal with antecedent (back-ground checks) reports , it relied on the sub-offi­cer in charge of the area in which the poten­tial force appli­cant resided.
The assump­tion made in using that method was that those sub-offi­cers would be in the best posi­tion to know the full and true char­ac­ter of the applicant.
The prob­lem with that assump­tion is that most of those antecedent reports by these low­er to mid­dle man­agers were done from miss Mary’s bar stool.
In the end I’m not say­ing that good qual­i­ty peo­ple weren’t recruit­ed into the force but as the Nation became more cor­rupt the pool of good qual­i­ty can­di­dates dried up.
The effects of those bar-stool antecedent reports have been very evi­dent over the last three decades.

(2)TRAINING.
The train­ing of the Island’s police offi­cers have not kept pace with the sophis­ti­ca­tion with which crime has evolved . Considering that Jamaica is one of the world’s most vio­lent and mur­der­ous nations.
The Police high com­mand does­n’t even seem to under­stand those com­plex­i­ties much less pre­pared should such a com­plex sit­u­a­tion present itself which cer­tain­ly will giv­en time.
The gen­er­al con­sen­sus is that offi­cers are unsure how to effect a sim­ple arrest. Set aside the INDECOM Act which is a dan­ger­ous crime-enhance­ment law, offi­cers are more and more less inclined to even help their col­league to secure a vio­lent sus­pect because they do not want to go through an inves­ti­ga­tion for doing exact­ly what they are sworn to do.
Simple take-down tech­niques , quick­ly secur­ing the sus­pect with swift and decid­ed author­i­ty and remov­ing the sus­pect from the hos­tile envi­ron­ment which is now wher­ev­er any group of Jamaican con­verge to watch a poten­tial arrest.
Officers who fail to assist their col­leagues in effect­ing a law­ful arrest must face severe dis­ci­pline which should include removal from the streets and retraining.

(3) SUPERVISION.
Younger offi­cers must be super­vised at all times a patrol or group of offi­cers oper­at­ing on a raid or spot check must be super­vised by a com­pe­tent sub-offi­cer or gazetted offi­cer who has street creds . The force is top heavy with kha­ki-clad offi­cers what are they occu­pied with in offices why are they not on the streets?
Police work is done on the streets , that is where they ought to be .
Whenever mem­bers of the senior corps of the force are on the streets from the rank of Inspector up I want to see them prop­er­ly armed with batons, guns and oth­er para­pher­na­lia of policing .
What is the pur­pose of the swag­ger cane or oth­er cane, and the stu­pid book in hand and no weapon? What are they there for if they are not there to do police work?

(4) TACTICS..
The police depart­ment must now devel­op a tac­ti­cal field man­u­al which specif­i­cal­ly spells out how each and every sit­u­a­tion is to be dealt with under exist­ing laws.
The JCF now has it’s own lawyers, the field com­man­ders (if the force have any com­pe­tent ones) should be called in to work with the depart­men­t’s lawyers to devel­op strate­gies with­ing exist­ing laws . Those strate­gies should then be incor­po­rat­ed into the train­ing Academy’s cur­ricu­lum and be part of each divi­sion­al and area com­mand train­ing continuüm.
If the depart­ment does not have com­pe­tent tac­ti­cal strate­gists it should seek help form peo­ple who know how. The Tivoli Gardens Inquiry should inform that deci­sion with clar­i­ty and dispatch.
Crime is an evolv­ing con­cept so too must Policing be. The police-high com­mand can­not be about fol­low­ing behind politi­cians and point­ing fin­gers at the rank and file for fail­ures which are the senior cor­p’s. On that basis the senior corp of offi­cers must meet reg­u­lar­ly to map out con­ceiv­able strate­gies on poten­tial even­tu­al­i­ties and devel­op work­able answers to those sce­nar­ios and put effec­tive plans in place to acti­vate and exe­cute said respons­es with max­i­mum alacrity and effectiveness.

(5) ACCOUNTABILITY.
If you can’t real­ly mea­sure it you can­not fix it.
The JCF Must now move to a (COMPSTAT) Computer Statistics type account­abil­i­ty and approach to crime.
Most mod­ern police depart­ments have moved to this type of polic­ing which iden­ti­fies spikes in crim­i­nal activities .
This process requires high rank­ing police depart­ment lead­ers to iden­ti­fy spikes in crimes using com­par­a­tive sta­tis­tics and address those spikes through the use of tar­get­ed enforcement.
Anything else is tan­ta­mount to a dog chas­ing it’s tail . The police depart­ment can­not be about putting out fires wher­ev­er they flare-up with­out a spe­cif­ic plan of action.
The JCF has always been a com­pla­cent low-think­ing force which falls back to it’s com­pla­cen­cy as soon as there is a lull.
There must now be an approach which includes the process of con­sol­i­da­tion on every gain.

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Recently the Commissioner of police addressed the issue of pro­mo­tion in response to state­ments made by Robert Montague’s Minister of National Security .
The com­mis­sion­er char­ac­ter­ized the issue as a vexed issue after the Minister cor­rect­ly said that if some­one was not pro­mot­ed then the thing to do was to call that per­son in and explain why he/​she passed the req­ui­site exams and was not promoted.
I had a good laugh at this one in par­tic­u­lar , in my day one had to be of good con­duct, pass the exam and be up to stan­dard in apply­ing first aid which was deter­mined by a writ­ten test as well as sit­ting in on actu­al first aid tech­nique sessions.
Despite those pre-req­ui­sites it was com­mon place to see younger peo­ple who just left the acad­e­my some­times who haven’t even sat an exam but sits in an office pro­mot­ed over the peo­ple work­ing their ass­es of day on night to secure the country.

This par­tic­u­lar prac­tice caused good intel­li­gent street savvy cops to exit the depart­ment while they pro­mote the polit­i­cal trolls, the incom­pe­tent news-car­ri­ers, brown-nosers, and those who slept with their boss­es to posi­tions way above their capabilities.
I con­stant­ly hear from younger offi­cers about being led by gazetted offi­cers who have zero clue about what they are doing.
Some of these lead­ers come from the sit­u­a­tions I laid out and oth­ers come from the merged ISCF.
One young man who recent­ly left the force told me of instances where the com­mand­ing offi­cer had no idea how to com­plete a charg­ing infor­ma­tion to place a sus­pect before the courts.
Those are most­ly the peo­ple exe­cut­ing polic­ing strate­gies on the Island .
Many have argued for the dis­band­ment of the JCF , I make no such argu­ment. Jamaican police offi­cer must always be Jamaicans we can do a bet­ter job with what is already there ‚it require lead­er­ship on the part of the senior corp .
Unfortunately that lead­er­ship is lack­ing because with the excep­tion of maybe a few cas­es most of the peo­ple who occu­py those posi­tions did not receive those advance­ments on mer­it and there­in lie the problem.
Stop blam­ing the young offi­cers the chick­ens have sim­ply come home to roost , it’s always the coach­es fault . Blaming the play­ers is pathet­ic and smacks of the basic inabil­i­ty to under­stand leadership.

January 1982 I entered the police train­ing school on the back of a police truck, I was excit­ed about becom­ing a police offi­cer, hav­ing decid­ed against going to Mico Teachers college .
My sojourn at Port Royal was one of excite­ment but also one of dis­ap­point­ment as the group of us around fifty plus was not a full com­ple­ment which would be enough to make up a grad­u­at­ing class.
So it was weeks before we took the oath of office despite the fact that we were effec­tive­ly seen as agents of the state and was sub­ject to the dic­tates of the staff.
Not only was the num­ber of us insuf­fi­cient we lat­er real­ized that we would be the last batch of recruits ever to set foot as police trainees at the Port Royal facility.
Police train­ing was to be removed to the for­mer Jamaica School of Agriculture at Twickenham Park and we were to be the ones doing the heavy lift­ing of remov­ing the school into the new facil­i­ty which would become the Police Academy.
It was iron­ic because as a high school stu­dent I decid­ed I would attend the Jamaica School of Agriculture after I was giv­en a free trip to the school by my Agriculture teacher mis­ter Bascoe.
I nev­er real­ized I would receive train­ing at the same facil­i­ty but for a whole oth­er discipline.
Months lat­er a full com­ple­ment of recruits arrived and we com­menced train­ing. December of 1982 one hun­dred and five of us passed out as pro­ba­tion­ary con­sta­bles. We would hold the dis­tinct hon­or of being the very first batch to com­mence train­ing and pass out at the police academy.

After serv­ing the force for rough­ly 10 years I decid­ed in 1991 it was best if I left as I did not like the direc­tion in which it appeared to be head­ing. At the time my boss at the CIB office at Constant Spring Noël Asphall, a man I loved and had the utmost respect for told me he was sad to see me go but if he was my age he would have done the very same thing.
I real­ized there and then that my deci­sion to exit the force at that time was indeed the cor­rect deci­sion, one I have not regret­ted since.
The present Assistant Commissioner of police in charge of crime Élan Powell served under mis­ter Asphall’s lead­er­ship as well as oth­er senior offi­cers of the depart­ment SSP Colin Pinnock, ACP Devon Watkiss, and others.

Many oth­er for­mer mem­bers of that cadre of offi­cers who made up the Constant Spring CIB office have left as I have, and a cou­ple has not fared as well as they ought to, nev­er­the­less I believe that that group of detec­tives was arguably the best ever assem­bled any­where in Jamaica in the his­to­ry of the JCF .
We pro­duced results. Not ever offi­cer was per­fect, in fact, none of us were, what we learned was to make each piece of the puz­zle work as a cohe­sive unit for the bet­ter­ment of the office, the results were astounding.
There are many unsung heroes whose names I will nev­er for­get , men like Donald McKinnis, Barrington Campbell, Altamont (Parra) Campbell, Jerry Wallace, Tracy, Little wicked Henry, Dadrick Henry, (Ellison deceased) Hanson, Scully, Allan Campbell, Dacres, Marc Foster, Allen Gauntlet ‚Ankle, Artel Morgan, George Henry, Dawes, and others.

We under­stood the val­ue and the con­cept of “Esprit the corp”, as police detec­tives we knew quite well that we depend­ed on each oth­er to be the eyes behind each oth­er. Looking out for the safe­ty of our fel­low offi­cers could only be a bad thing if it emanat­ed from the intel­lec­tu­al ghetto.
We were con­fi­dent that the offi­cer behind us was not a part of any crim­i­nal gang, he or she was not aligned to any crim­i­nal enter­prise which would cause him/​her to put a bul­let in the back of our indi­vid­ual heads.
As I said we weren’t per­fect but we under­stood the weak­ness­es and frail­ties inher­ent in each oth­er. It came as no sur­prise that on the night a cow­ard attacked and shot me in my hip on Blackwood Terrace off Red Hills Road a recent trans­plant the detec­tive cor­po­ral who had recent­ly arrived from Spanish Town to join the office ran away out of fear.
None of the core group of offi­cers would have shown such cow­ardice. Ultimately though shot, I pre­vailed against the cow­ard­ly punk and removed anoth­er weapon from the streets in 1988.

I nev­er received a tele­phone call from the Commissioner of Police Herman Rickets, nei­ther did I receive any com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the police fed­er­a­tion. It did not require much more for me to real­ize that the police agency was not one in which I want­ed to remain.
Despite the sev­er­al com­men­da­tions which would come lat­er my mind was made up that the police force would not be a career for me.

Fast for­ward to the 90’s and the 2000’s between the entrenched Government of the day and the crim­i­nal lob­by­ists the police were incred­i­bly indoc­tri­nat­ed from the acad­e­my into believ­ing that “Esprit de corps” was a bad thing.
Young recruits were indoc­tri­nat­ed into believ­ing that their core func­tion was to respect the rights of crim­i­nals, not place them in cus­tody where they belong.
At the same time there was zero empha­sis in the pub­lic space on edu­cat­ing the pub­lic about the respect it must have for the rule of law. There was no edu­ca­tion that the offi­cers who enforced the law must be respect­ed. Most impor­tant­ly, there were no new laws enact­ed which made it a felony pun­ish­able with seri­ous prison time for assault­ing a police officer.

The reverse was done, as was the case when I served up to the ear­ly 90’s, activist judges (you’ve guessed it from the intel­lec­tu­al ghet­to, would sum­mar­i­ly dis­miss assault and resist­ing arrest charges against even the most hos­tile crim­i­nals. This in and of itself forced offi­cers to be more aggres­sive in pro­tect­ing them­selves because nei­ther the leg­is­la­ture nor the courts would.
The peri­od of the 1990’s to ear­ly 2000 was a peri­od which saw crime esca­late to unprece­dent­ed lev­els cul­mi­nat­ing in over 1600 homi­cides for the sin­gle year of 2005.
This did not hap­pen overnight.
The PNP admin­is­tra­tion which held pow­er for an unprece­dent­ed ¹⁴¹⁄₂ years did noth­ing about crime. Percival James Patterson the Prime min­is­ter for most of that peri­od a lawyer by trade, pret­ty much gave crim­i­nals (carte blanch) a blank check, to do what­ev­er they want­ed, the nar­ra­tive which emanat­ed from that peri­od in Jamaican his­to­ry was “run wid it , any­thing a any­thing”.

It was a tac­it sup­port and endorse­ment for peo­ple to go out and do what­ev­er they want­ed to do while the admin­is­tra­tion went ahead wrecked the econ­o­my and pil­laged the nation’s coffers.
It has been com­mon knowl­edge that the major­i­ty of the Jamaican peo­ple pre­fer when the PNP forms the Government because they are allowed to do as they please.
They under­stand that a PNP Government does not care a rat’s ass about putting crim­i­nals in jail, it’s free­dom to do what­ev­er they want.
To this day some of the nations most vio­lent crim­i­nal gangs are affil­i­at­ed with the par­ty. Arresting well-con­nect­ed king­pins in Jamaica whether PNP or JLP can only be under­tak­en by the United States of America.
Not only did Patterson not do a damn thing about the crime rate he nev­er made a red cent avail­able to train a sin­gle detec­tive for almost a whole decade.
The Police hier­ar­chy attest­ed to that fact. That was the peri­od when the very nature of our coun­try changed. The cul­ture changed. The peo­ple changed. It was the time dur­ing which our coun­try expe­ri­enced unprece­dent­ed lev­els of homi­cides and became the num­ber one mur­der cap­i­tal of the world.
A dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion which occurred under the PNP’s stewardship.

Is the PNP sole­ly respon­si­ble for the nation’s woes?
Absolutely not but that par­ty has con­trolled pow­er for most of the time since Independence they have a larg­er share of the blame. It was under their watch that a Pediatric Doctor was able to effec­tive­ly change the way our nations streets and by-ways are policed. The result, thou­sands more dead, maimed and mutilated.
No per­son in their right mind would want a police state in which agents of the state abuse the rights of cit­i­zens, or are not held account­able when they break the laws. For the dura­tion of the ten years I served I made a con­scious effort to be cour­te­ous as much as I could to the peo­ple with whom I inter­act­ed. It was not always pos­si­ble to be cour­te­ous and kind to all peo­ple. Some make it impos­si­ble to be kind and cour­te­ous to them.
Whenever those occa­sions arose those were dealt with with the full force of the laws.
Despite safe­guards against police abuse, the police must have the pow­er to go after crim­i­nals wher­ev­er they are whether, in a shack in Majestic Gardens or sit­ting in Jamaica house, no one is big­ger than the law.

At the time they inti­mat­ed they intend­ed to mod­ern­ize the JCF I was ecsta­t­ic that a mod­ern police force in Jamaica would be a dri­ving eco­nom­ic engine for our coun­try’s development.
I believed that the sin­gle largest imped­i­ment to the Island’s growth was the bur­geon­ing crime sit­u­a­tion, it remains so today despite what appears to be blind­ness by both polit­i­cal par­ties. It’s not that the par­ties are blind to this fact, both have func­tionar­ies who are criminals.
What I failed to take into account is that more peo­ple with degrees did not mean a mod­ern police force or a bet­ter police force.
The very same spe­cial treat­ment for some, nepo­tism, polit­i­cal advance­ments and the oth­er non-mer­it based advance­ment prac­tices would remain.
Out of that came a younger cadre of offi­cers who did not see a future for them­selves in the depart­ment, nei­ther did they have the option to leave as some of us had done earlier.

Graft, cor­rup­tion, and gross-crim­i­nal con­duct result­ed in a bad­ly thought out, bad­ly researched piece of leg­is­la­tion which was intend­ed to cor­ral dirty cops.
The inde­pen­dent com­mis­sion of Investigations(INDECOM)the dar­ling of the crim­i­nal class was born.
At the heart of the Act was the desire to sup­pos­ed­ly curb what was char­ac­ter­ized as extra-judi­cial police killings. To its cred­it, the INDECOM Act result­ed in few­er killings by police but not some­thing which law-abid­ing cit­i­zens can celebrate.
Nevertheless, INDECOM and its sup­port­ers point to the drop in police killings as a sign that their meth­ods are indeed bear­ing fruits.The nar­cis­sis­tic over­ly ambi­tious com­mis­sion­er Terrence Williams use those sta­tis­tics to dri­ve home his point while demand­ing more pow­er to go after mem­bers of the police force.
What they do not both­er to men­tion is that while police killings had dropped, crim­i­nals have gone on a killing spree, hav­ing a free hand to do as they please with­out any fear of the police who are scared to do their jobs.

The more edu­cat­ed police brass are not shy about giv­ing inter­views from behind their nice desks in their ful­ly air-con­di­tioned offices replete with mod­ern com­put­ers. Despite the infu­sion of mod­ern ameni­ties the crime rate con­tin­ues to gal­lop out of control.
Nowadays it is clear the coun­try is in seri­ous trou­ble much more than the peo­ple real­ize. The police whether through lack of effec­tive train­ing or fear, are unable to effect a sim­ple arrest.
Every arrest becomes a major spec­ta­cle with crowds jeer­ing and threat­en­ing the arrest­ing officer/s.Most shock­ing­ly are the cas­es where one or two officer/​s strug­gle with a sus­pect who is vio­lent­ly resist­ing while one or more offi­cers stand by total­ly disinterested.

Am I to believe that the kha­ki-clad offi­cers bound behind their desks do not peruse social-media? Are you telling me they do not see these egre­gious acts of assault being vis­it­ed on the younger men of the depart­ment? Are they blind to these acts of indis­ci­pline when offi­cers fail to sup­port each oth­er in effect­ing arrests?
How can they not see the dan­ger to the younger offi­cers who are in most instances sur­round­ed by vio­lent crowds egging on the sus­pects even as these young offi­cers car­ry out their law­ful duties?
What kind of police force throws it’s own to the wolves and the rav­en­ous dogs which now seem to make up the Jamaican society?
Where is the com­mis­sion­er of police?
Where is the police fed­er­a­tion on this.?

It’s only a mat­ter of time before some­one grabs a cop’s gun and seri­ous­ly wound or kill offi­cers as they do their jobs.
Oh wait, it recent­ly hap­pened in front of the Olympic Gardens Police sta­tion, though slight­ly dis-sim­i­lar, the very sta­tion in which sev­er­al offi­cers lost their lives to maraud­ing ter­ror­ists in the 1980’s.
Every sus­pect wants to engage in a fight with cops, what are the cops going to do about it? They can be heard say­ing yu can’t du mi nut­ten, yu can’t shoot mi”.
They know that the INDECOM Act is a crime enhance­ment law and they are tak­ing full advan­tage of it.
The senior Officers from those at 103 Old Hope Road right on down are quite will­ing to throw them to the wolves for a glass of rum. And the Federation is worse than a neutered mon­grel, much bark no bite.
Nevertheless, the police must take some of the blame, every police offi­cer is trained in effec­tive­ly han­dling a bel­liger­ent suspect.
It’s rather simple …

SEQUENCE…

(1) You are under arrest place your hands behind your back!
Suspect refuses.
(2) Physically grab him/​her, to the ground you go,( every offi­cer on scene involved), if enough offi­cers, oth­ers make sure that bystanders main­tain a safe dis­tance for offi­cer safety.
(3) Quickly cuff and place sus­pect in the vehicle.
(4) Any per­son who active­ly got in the way of, inter­fered with or coun­seled the accused to resist must then be sub­ject­ed to 1 – 2 & 3.
Use force com­men­su­rate with resis­tance. The laws are clear you have the right to do your jobs with­out being attacked or hurt.
Do your job cor­rect­ly and if they want it to give them the phone num­ber to INDECOM.
Make the damn arrest with author­i­ty they will know you are not play­ing around.

THE Opposition yes­ter­day poured cold water on National Security Minister Robert Montague’s announce­ment that he is con­tem­plat­ing the resump­tion of hang­ing in Jamaica, argu­ing that the death penal­ty does not act as a deter­rent to mur­der and is not the solu­tion the country’s nag­ging prob­lem of vio­lent crime.

According to Opposition spokesman on jus­tice and gov­er­nance, Senator Mark Golding, coun­tries in the world that have abol­ished the death penal­ty gen­er­al­ly remain the safest, with the least num­ber of mur­ders. “Those states in the United States which retain and apply the death penal­ty (for exam­ple Texas) are not the states which enjoy the low­est mur­der rates in the US. The active use of the death penal­ty in Jamaica did not pre­vent the car­nage of mur­ders in 1980,” Golding said. Noting that it is not nec­es­sary for the resump­tion of hang­ing at this time, he said that mur­ders have declined by 40 per cent since the extra­di­tion of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke in 2010, dur­ing an era where the death penal­ty was not a factor.

He said that the Opposition is of the view that the death penal­ty can­not be the solu­tion to Jamaica’s prob­lem of vio­lent crime. “Violent crime in Jamaica has sev­er­al root caus­es, and curb­ing it requires solu­tions that address those caus­es,” he said. Golding sug­gest­ed that Jamaica needs, among oth­er things, growth with equi­ty that cre­ates good-qual­i­ty employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties for our peo­ple, so that they aren’t drawn towards crim­i­nal organ­i­sa­tions and vio­lent crime. He added that the mod­erni­sa­tion and strength­en­ing of the jus­tice sys­tem need to be con­tin­ued, and the imple­men­ta­tion of the Justice Reform Programme should not be allowed to lose momen­tum. “I do not regard min­is­ter Montague’s announce­ment, that the Government is seek­ing “to deter­mine if there are any legal imped­i­ments for the resump­tion of hang­ing in Jamaica”, as a seri­ous pol­i­cy ini­tia­tive that will be imple­ment­ed. The Government can’t hang more peo­ple; nor, as a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, can Parliament. Only the courts can make that hap­pen, and the courts are gov­erned by the rule of law and, in par­tic­u­lar, the human rights guar­an­tees in our Constitution,” Golding said.

In addi­tion, he said that the reac­ti­va­tion of the death penal­ty after 28 years would bring con­dem­na­tion and adverse crit­i­cism on Jamaica from inter­na­tion­al devel­op­ment part­ners that are not in sup­port of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Last week, Montague said Government remains com­mit­ted to mobil­is­ing all the resources at its dis­pos­al to wage a “relent­less war” against crim­i­nal ele­ments “intent on destroy­ing our nation”. To this end, he said the Administration is cur­rent­ly explor­ing the pos­si­ble resump­tion of hang­ing. Noting that it forms part of the crime-pre­ven­tion strate­gies aimed at cre­at­ing safer com­mu­ni­ties by tack­ling “law­less ele­ments”, Montague said his state min­is­ter, Pearnel Charles Jr, has been asked to con­sult with sev­er­al stake­hold­ers, includ­ing the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General’s Office, to deter­mine if there are any “legal imped­i­ments” to be addressed. He said the ministry’s over­all approach to cre­at­ing safer com­mu­ni­ties is based on five key pil­lars of crime pre­ven­tion: social devel­op­ment, sit­u­a­tion­al pre­ven­tion, effec­tive polic­ing, swift and sure jus­tice process­es, and reduc­ing re-offending.

MEANWHILE.…
Missing American mis­sion­ary found dead.

ST MARY, Jamaica – OBSERVER ONLINE has learnt that the body of an American mis­sion­ary who was ear­li­er report­ed miss­ing, has been found. 

The search for Harold Nichols con­clud­ed a short while ago when a team of police and res­i­dents found his body in St Mary. His head was report­ed­ly bashed in.
A search was launched for Nichols after his col­league, Randy Hentzel, who is also an American, was found dead on Saturday afternoon.
.….….…..

PORT MARIA, St Mary — Sunday after­noons are tra­di­tion­al­ly spent at home with fam­i­ly mem­bers in Jamaica; how­ev­er, for the res­i­dents of Boscobel in St Mary, Sunday, May 1 was spent search­ing for a man they loved, even as they griev­ed for another.

Their hope was to find Harold Nichols alive; how­ev­er, they were left dis­ap­point­ed and over­come with grief as Nichols’ body was dis­cov­ered after 4:00 pm yes­ter­day. The body of 48-year-old Randy Hentzel had been found a day ear­li­er on Saturday after­noon, after 12:00 pm. However, there were no signs of his col­league, mis­sion­ary Nichols, after the two went on a trail in the Albion Mountain area on Saturday. Reports from the St Mary police are that the two men rent­ed motor­cy­cles in Ocho Rios and went on the trail. Residents stum­bled on Hentzel’s body after 12:00 pm and the police were sum­moned. Deputy Superintendent of Police Dwight Powell said Hentzel’s body was found face down with his hands bound with a piece of cloth believed to be torn from his shirt. One of the motor­cy­cles was seen beside his body. The sec­ond motor­cy­cle was found approx­i­mate­ly three chains away. However, there was no sign of the sec­ond missionary.

While res­i­dents hoped for the best on Sunday, they were left dis­ap­point­ed after the body of the sec­ond mis­sion­ary was found. His head was report­ed­ly bashed in.

The police, along with approx­i­mate­ly 70 res­i­dents, searched for Nichols from approx­i­mate­ly 7:00 am Sunday morn­ing until after 2:00 pm. They lat­er returned to search with the help of canines when the body was found. The two men, who have been vis­it­ing Jamaica for the past 14 years, have done much work in the Boscobel area. “They have Bible study at their homes; every day the chil­dren go there,” Councillor for the Boscobel Division Fitzroy Wilson said. “I have been work­ing with him for the past six to sev­en years,” Wilson said of Nichols. Such was the evi­dence of their work, that res­i­dents turned out in their num­bers to aid in Sunday’s search. “When the chil­dren go to Bible study, he pro­vid­ed refresh­ments for them. He helped some of the kids with mon­ey for school, with their back-to-school,” Wilson said. He said Nichols and his team also built homes in the Boscobel area for indi­gent people.

“We have three hous­es now that we are work­ing on, and just [last] Tuesday we had a meet­ing,” he said. He said at the meet­ing it was revealed that a mis­sion team would vis­it the island next week and work would have con­tin­ued to assist the res­i­dents. “It’s just sad. It is very, very sad,” Wilson said. An elder­ly woman who was among the res­i­dents said she was out with those who searched on Sunday because she, too, has ben­e­fit­ed from the assis­tance of Nichols and his team. “That man build a house and give me,” Goffeth Miller said. Sharon Scott of the Red Cross in Boscobel said Nichols assist­ed the team to build a house for a home­less man last August. “Those two men are two well-loved men in the com­mu­ni­ty,” she said. Scott said res­i­dents wept open­ly on Sunday after the grue­some dis­cov­ery was made in the Albion Mountain area. Community grieves after 2 American mis­sion­ar­ies found dead

KINGSTON, Jamaica – The United States Ambassador to Jamaica Luis Moreno, has extend­ed his “deep­est con­do­lences” to the rel­a­tives and col­leagues of the slain police­woman Judith Williams.

Describing Williams’ mur­der as a sense­less tragedy Moreno said, “every­day many law enforce­ment offi­cers across this island risk their own safe­ty to pro­tect our lives. For this, they deserve respect and grat­i­tude. I com­mend those Officers who con­tin­ue to con­duct their duties pro­fes­sion­al­ly and just­ly with­out fear or favour”.

“On behalf of the United States Mission to Jamaica, I extend our deep and sin­cere con­do­lences to the fam­i­ly and col­leagues of Corporal Judith Williams, who lost her life at the hands of gun­men,” Moreno said in a press release from the Embassy this afternoon.

“This inci­dent and oth­ers like it rein­force that we all must work togeth­er across com­mu­ni­ties and bor­ders to rid this beau­ti­ful coun­try of vio­lence and crim­i­nal­i­ty,” Moreno added.

Williams, 54, who was assigned to the Office of the Commissioner of Police was shot mul­ti­ple times by two men while at a bus stop on her way to work ear­ly Thursday morning.

Police report that the two cul­prits fled the scene on Bray Street, Franklyn Town in east Kingston on a motorcycle.

US Ambassador extends con­do­lences to rel­a­tives, col­leagues of slain policewoman

The rea­sons for crime are many and mul­ti­fac­eted. Likewise, there is no sin­gle or easy solution.

As was said in this space last Friday, the snail-paced nature of Jamaica’s jus­tice sys­tem which, for exam­ple, has so far served to neuter what was sup­posed to be potent anti-gang leg­is­la­tion, has weak­ened crime-fight­ing. Then there is the chron­i­cal­ly under-resourced state of the secu­ri­ty forces: inad­e­quate per­son­nel on the ground, as well as sparse mobil­i­ty and crime-fight­ing tools.

Part of the prob­lem is that, in real terms, the Jamaican soci­ety has rarely focused on crime as a num­ber one pri­or­i­ty. To be fair, Jamaica with its vibrant pol­i­tics, but numer­ous and hefty socio/​economic prob­lems, can’t eas­i­ly focus. With the com­pet­ing demands of unem­ploy­ment, high cost of liv­ing, inad­e­quate health care, edu­ca­tion, shod­dy infra­struc­ture in terms of water, hous­ing, roads, et al, crime — enor­mous prob­lem though it is – some­times gets short shrift in elec­tion campaigns.

I read the story of the oldest known ex-police officer in Jamaica twice his story is riveting and compelling. Despite the challenges of the job he is not bitter or angry 104-year-old Howell Burke, joined the police force on “January 7, 1939” my dearly departed Grandfather was a mere 28 years old at the time.

Mister Burke spoke about his faith. “Longevity wasn’t promised to me, it was a gift from God Himself, because He spared me from four instant deaths dur­ing my life,”.
He spoke dur­ing the inter­view about his feel­ings when Basil Robinson the very first black man was appoint­ed the com­mis­sion­er of police.
“It was the right move,” he said. “We had to have a com­mis­sion­er. As a mat­ter of fact, any­body could have become the com­mis­sion­er, because all we want­ed was a man with dig­ni­ty, a man who was strict to duty, devot­ed to his task and who had inter­est in the work and the inter­est of the men under him.”
One mem­ber of the police par­ty sit­ting in on the inter­view seek­ing to inject polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness chimed in …
“Men and women”.
“We nev­er had women in those days.” Mister Burke corrected.
Whoops , how about know­ing the his­to­ry of the orga­ni­za­tion before open­ing your mouth?

Mister Howell Burke lament­ed that even though he was asked to act in senior posi­tions he was not paid for the times he did. He also said that despite enter­ing the force with cre­den­tials of a teach­ing assis­tant he was not pro­mot­ed com­men­su­rate with those credentials.
He retired from the force at the rank of sergeant.
His com­ments high­light the issues which have plagued the police force arguably since it’s incep­tion and per­sists to this day.
As a for­mer mem­ber who quick­ly left once I real­ized the inner work­ings of the force and the mind­set of the coun­try toward the rule of law I am enthralled by the ser­vice of this vet­er­an and I wish to offer up my best wish­es to him and pray that if it’s God’s will he will have many more healthy years.

THE REAL ISSUE WHICH EMANATED FROM HOWELL BURKE’S INTERVIEW WITH THE OBSERVER

What I real­ly want­ed to relate to from mis­ter Burke’s sto­ry is the rev­e­la­tion that he was a mem­ber of the police par­ty which clashed with Rastafarians in Coral Gardens St James in April 1963.
Said, Mister Burke…
I was the first police­man on the scene and I always say I was the last man to leave, because it was after [Superintendent] Bertie Scott was shot and killed that it end­ed,” Burke said. “It was he who led us into bat­tle. But I can’t give it to you piece­meal like that.” We, the police­men, up to the time when we left the scene when Bertie was killed, no one could tell why such a thing hap­pened, why the attack on the Rastas took place,” 
“You see, we were defend­ing the police, the Government and the peo­ple of Jamaica, because when we went there, at the spot where Bertie was killed, one detec­tive was already hacked to death, Detective Melbourne; and two oth­er police­men were sup­posed to have been killed, but luck­i­ly one sur­vived. I can’t remem­ber the name of the oth­er one, but the one who sur­vived was Campbell, a young police­man. He was left on the way­side to die, because even when we were going up in the riv­er to look for the gang of men who were sup­posed to be in the hills, we passed him lying there with the oth­er man, and we gave him up as dead,”.

According to the Jamaica Observer the offi­cer ref­er­enced was Constable Errol Campbell who, at the time, was ren­dered per­ma­nent­ly dis­abled because of severe injuries to his head and was wheel­chair bound from that time.
Many Jamaicans are not ful­ly con­ver­sant of events which occurred in Coral Gardens in 1963.

The vio­lence in Coral Gardens was trig­gered by a land dis­pute the pre­vi­ous year involv­ing Rudolph Franklin, a Cornwall College grad­u­ate who had embraced the Rastafarian faith. He was report­ed­ly farm­ing ille­gal­ly on land in the Tryall area owned by the Kerr-Jarrett fam­i­ly. During an alter­ca­tion with a police offi­cer, he was alleged­ly shot five times and left for dead in a church­yard. Discovered by school­child­ren, Franklin was tak­en to hos­pi­tal where he was treat­ed but, on his release, was charged with pos­ses­sion of gan­ja. He was sen­tenced to six months in prison and, accord­ing to those who knew him, was an embit­tered per­son when released in ear­ly 1963. Further police harass­ment, they said, pushed him over the edge and sparked the Coral Gardens attack.

Three Rastafarians, three civil­ians and two police­men died at Coral Gardens. Among the dead was Rudolph Franklin, the mil­i­tant leader of the Rasta group that set the Ken Douglas Shell ser­vice sta­tion on fire, before killing the civil­ians, cor­po­ral Clifford Melbourne and Inspector Bertie Scott.
Franklin and two of his accom­plices, Lloyd Waldron and Noël Bowen, were killed at Coral Gardens. Two oth­ers, Carlton Bowen and Clinton Larman, were charged with mur­der and went on tri­al in July 1964. They were found guilty and sen­tenced to hang fol­low­ing a month-long tri­al presided over by Justice Ronald Small. Bowen and Larmond were hanged on December 2, 1964. (source jg).

Agents of the state were mur­dered in that event which was pre­cip­i­tat­ed by the mil­i­tan­cy and ille­gal activ­i­ty of the then-bur­geon­ing Rastafarian move­ment on the Island. Their rhetoric and actions were seen as a threat to nation­al secu­ri­ty and cor­rect­ly so.
The Island’s Prime Minister of the time the Rt Honorable Sir Alexander Bustamante ordered the Military and the police to deci­sive­ly put down the insur­rec­tion which they did.
Officer Howell Burke under­stand that at the time he and his col­leagues were defend­ing the Government and most impor­tant­ly our country.
Officer Howell Burke a cen­te­nar­i­an ful­ly under­stood the con­text in which he and his col­leagues were law­ful­ly and appro­pri­ate­ly ordered to restore order to a chaot­ic sit­u­a­tion in which mur­der and arson had already occurred.
The courts also ful­filled its law­ful oblig­a­tion under the law in the judg­ment it passed and the judg­ment of the courts was appro­pri­ate­ly executed.

Decades lat­er our coun­try has walked away from com­mon-sense law enforce­ment, sup­plant­i­ng the rule of law with ide­o­log­i­cal lib­er­al­ism which has its birth­place at the Mona cam­pus­es of the University of the West Indies.
Those attempts at social engi­neer­ing have result­ed in a cor­rupt and incom­pe­tent crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and a police depart­ment which is a tooth­less paper tiger.
The ensu­ing result is a coun­try in which crim­i­nal gang activ­i­ty is on the rise. The police esti­mate there are over three hun­dred crim­i­nal gangs oper­at­ing on the island of 2.7 mil­lion people.
Each year the Island expe­ri­ences over a thou­sand homi­cides with less than 7% of mur­der­ers con­vict­ed for their crimes.
Of the few who are sen­tenced the appeals courts usu­al­ly revis­it their sen­tences and either reduce the sen­tence of the low­er court or release the offend­er on some archa­ic technicality.

Last December, Public Defender Arlene Harrison Henry sent a report to Parliament, the result of an inves­ti­ga­tion into sev­er­al inci­dents, includ­ing the bloody Coral Gardens clash, for which she rec­om­mend­ed repa­ra­tions and that the Jamaican State apol­o­gizes to Rastafarians.
In any oth­er nation, a pub­lic offi­cial intend­ing to stick her nose into this issue would seek to send a report to the par­lia­ment ask­ing that there be recog­ni­tion of the offi­cers who gave their lives on that day.
Our coun­try has devolved into a mis­guid­ed crim­i­nal par­adise in which self-serv­ing indi­vid­u­al­ists rec­om­mends that Arsonists and cop killers be giv­en remu­ner­a­tions and an apology.

This writer have written several articles regaling the police department and more specifically the Commissioner of Police since news broke that a well known criminal had snuffed out the life of two police officers at poor-man’s corner in the parish of St Thomas just before Christmas of 2015.

Before I go any fur­ther let me pre­empt the inevitable asser­tion that “no life is more impor­tant that anoth­er so the police should go after all killers whether they be cop killers or not” . We have heard that argu­ment too many times ‚I no longer want to respond to it. No one is say­ing police lives are more impor­tant , what we are say­ing is that the police stand between they who would kill us and us .
If the police are all killed there is no buffer, so we have to care about those who risk life and limb for us.

See also: https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​t​h​r​e​e​-​m​o​n​t​h​s​-​l​a​t​e​r​-​n​o​-​w​o​r​d​-​d​u​p​p​y​-​f​i​l​m​-​a​l​l​e​g​e​d​-​c​o​p​-​k​i​l​l​e​r​-​s​t​i​l​l​-​l​o​se/

I doubt seri­ous­ly whether my low­ly yelp­ing had any­thing to do with the police’ push to find this alleged cop-killer Marlon Perry o/​c (dup­py film), but it is a wel­come sight to see that the police are active­ly search­ing for him that’s what matters.
I would imag­ine there is cred­i­ble intel­li­gence which would sup­port the police’s the­o­ry that this alleged mur­der­er is, or was in the parish of Manchester.
As a mat­ter of fact the cap­ture of Kevon Eldermire, oth­er­wise called ‘(Harry Patta) in the parish may be a good indi­ca­tor that even if Perry isn’t/​wasn’t in the parish at least the intel­li­gence had credibility.
Perry’s sup­posed escape from a drag­net is rea­son for the police to reeval­u­ate how they go about these oper­a­tions. For decades our police oper­a­tions have been inside out events which gives sus­pects the abil­i­ty to escape once they elude the ini­tial push.
Many for­mer offi­cers still sub­scribe to this way of doing things, I don’t.
Operations should be an out­side in event, tight­en­ing the cir­cle until the subject/​s is encir­cled with no place to go.
This can­not be some­thing decid­ed at the sta­tion lev­el or at the time the oper­a­tions offi­cer decides to lead sev­er­al dozen or sev­er­al hun­dred offi­cers on an operation.
These tac­tics must be taught at the train­ing acad­e­my and rehearsed at the sta­tion and divi­sion­al lev­els con­tin­u­al­ly so that when the need aris­es every offi­cer fits into the plan like pieces of a jig-saw puz­zle. Every offi­cer must know exact­ly what to do in the event of every giv­en poten­tial scenario.

The soon­er jus­tice is brought to this per­son the bet­ter it is for the police depart­ment, which at this time must first and fore­most look after offi­cer safe­ty before con­sid­er­ing any­one else.
let’s face it, bring­ing Perry in will not mean that the fam­i­lies of the two slain police offi­cers are guar­an­teed jus­tice. The reverse is true, the case will sim­ply drag on while the courts release him back onto the streets to kill again. In the end there will be a ver­dict but not one which works for the fam­i­lies of the dead cops.
The ver­dict will be that the case is thrown out for want of prosecution .
For those inter­est­ed in the truth, that is a tac­tic used to sub­vert the process of jus­tice it is a tri­ad of col­lu­sion which includes the accused crim­i­nal and their inter­est, their defense attorney/​s and the bench.
If the case drags on long enough pros­e­cu­tion wit­ness­es are either killed , have emi­grat­ed, for­got­ten the sequence of events to which they gave depo­si­tions, or have lost inter­est in the case. Case closed .….

Ironically there are high­ly placed peo­ple in Government who are unwit­ting­ly or com­plic­it­ly call­ing for cas­es over 5 years old to be purged from the court dock­ets, exact­ly what crim­i­nals and their bene­fac­tors want. Exactly what is not need­ed , it would be fuel to the fire of cor­rup­tion and incom­pe­tence in the crim­i­nal court system.
Officers may chose to be wary of going the extra mile when it comes to how they approach oth­er mur­ders as it relates to the (inde­com act).
When it comes to the killing of their col­leagues they should throw out any wari­ness and send a clear mes­sage it won’t be tolerated.
The peo­ple can clam­or for what they want, it’s up to them to deter­mine how much of their loved ones inno­cent blood is shed before they real­ize the (inde­com act) is caus­ing the esca­la­tion of crime on the Island.
Until they do offi­cers can run out the clock with­out expos­ing them­selves to undue harm.
The (inde­com act) has embold­ened crim­i­nal­i­ty on the Island , it is an un-belled cat that no rea­son­able per­son or enti­ty there wants to acknowl­edge was a bad idea whose time has come.

In the mean­time an empow­ered crim­i­nal under­world has unleashed it’s new found pow­er on police, killing offi­cers and defy­ing their abil­i­ty to enforce the nations laws.
Police offi­cers must deter­mine whether they will cow­er in fear or go out and exter­mi­nate the ver­mins (inde­com) be damned .

One of the things which total­ly pissed me off dur­ing my 10 year stint in the Jamaica Constabulary Force more than any­thing was the way cer­tain defense lawyers treat­ed the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem as offi­cers of the courts . Some would swoop into the court-room with an air of utter supe­ri­or­i­ty mak­ing the process about their grandios­i­ty than the sanc­ti­ty and fideli­ty of the process.
Not every Lawyer were divas, I had ter­rif­ic work­ing rela­tion­ships with some defense lawyers who were true pro­fes­sion­als. On the oth­er hand many oth­ers were con­sumed with their own sense of supe­ri­or­i­ty and impor­tance and they expect­ed the courts to acqui­esce to their wish­es and demands.
It was because of that air of arro­gance that per­me­at­ed the behav­ior of many of these lawyers why As a young offi­cer who was con­stant­ly before the courts I took no lip from any judge about being late for a case.
One of my famous dust-up was well doc­u­ment­ed with one of the bul­lies of the bench Lenslie Wolf who ulti­mate­ly retired as chief justice .

With foot firm­ly placed on the seat many of the ego-mani­a­cal lawyers would ask for adjourn­ments because they haven’t been paid, under­stand­ably, but they would also bitch and whine when the pros­e­cu­tion’s case is not ready because a wit­ness can­not be locat­ed or the foren­sic report is not ready. Did I men­tion that in those days there was one foren­sic office in Allman Town with One Forensic expert deal­ing with all of the Island’s foren­sics? Oh well I guess I just did. Nah that was not back in the 1950’s that was in the ear­ly 90’s.

I wish I had a dol­lar for every arti­cle I have writ­ten over the last sev­er­al years detail­ing just how the crim­i­nal courts have con­tributed to the crime sit­u­a­tion on the Island. Despite this it is the Police which takes the brunt of the blame for the dam­age done to the sys­tem. Hardly any­one speak to the arro­gance , over acqui­es­cence and the lib­er­al­ism with which the judi­cia­ry approach­es the dis­pen­sa­tion of jus­tice, save and except for a few no non­sense judges of the past.
The court­room is a place where jus­tice is sup­posed to be dis­pensed equi­tably and fair­ly not just in fact but it must also appear to be done.
Jamaica’s court-rooms are cus­tom­ar­i­ly a place where defense coun­sel and tri­al judges are chum­my , pros­e­cu­tors are tol­er­at­ed, police offi­cers and the bench are dis­tant ene­mies. That has been the gen­er­al rule save and except for a few judges and cer­tain police officers.
In many instances the ani­mus com­ing from the bench toward the police cre­at­ed dis­re­spect on the part of offend­ers before the court.
Jamaica’s crim­i­nals have keen sens­es they under­stand the cracks in they sys­tem and they exploit them fully
Jamaica’s crim­i­nals do not miss much, police offi­cers who tol­er­at­ed judges dis­re­spect got no respect from the streets . Officers who did not allow them­selves to be dis­re­spect­ed were high­ly respect­ed and revered.

Not much has changed for the bet­ter since the ear­ly 90’s in the way cas­es are han­dled in the crim­i­nal courts. In fact there is much evi­dence that the court sys­tem is a a cesspool of incom­pe­tence , crim­i­nal cod­dling and in many cas­es corruption.
In a recent dis­cus­sion I had with a prac­tic­ing defense attor­ney she defend­ed her pro­fes­sion say­ing that in stud­ies done it is found that most adjourn­ments are request­ed by the pros­e­cu­tor and not defense counsel.
Of course I under­stand the police is gross­ly incom­pe­tent and in many cas­es cor­rupt, but I have seen noth­ing which would con­vince me she is cor­rect in her asser­tion. Speaking on the issue of the inor­di­nate delays with­in the sys­tem recent­ly appoint­ed Minister of Justice Marlene Malahoo Forte a for­mer res­i­dent mag­is­trate said she would be meet­ing with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Jamaican Bar Association and the Advocates Association of Jamaica to address the long-stand­ing issue of the slow pace at which jus­tice is deliv­ered in the local court system.(Jg)

“I will be meet­ing with my col­leagues at the bar in short order, begin­ning with the lead­er­ship of the bar asso­ci­a­tion and advo­ca­cy asso­ci­a­tion, and I am con­fi­dent that we can min­imise the delay (of court case res­o­lu­tion), . “Delay in our courts is not just a mat­ter of per­cep­tion, it is a real­i­ty. Many peo­ple are wait­ing for their cas­es to be tried, and for some, their lives hang in the bal­ance while they wait,” said Malahoo Forte, who is also a for­mer mag­is­trate. “Some use var­i­ous delay tac­tics and manip­u­late the sys­tem­at­ic weak­ness­es to their advan­tage and to the frus­tra­tion of oth­ers. “No one par­ty is respon­si­ble for the prob­lem of delay, and no one par­ty can ade­quate­ly address the prob­lem,” argued Malahoo Forte. “Everyone will have to work togeth­er and exer­cise the appro­pri­ate lead­er­ship in their are­na. The min­istries of jus­tice and nation­al secu­ri­ty must col­lab­o­rate, in a new way, with bench and bar, on the leg­isla­tive and admin­is­tra­tive bar­ri­ers to tri­als being held with­in a rea­son­able time.”

Is Delroy Chuck King?

Literally every­one bears some respon­si­bil­i­ty but some are more cul­pa­ble than oth­ers. It was not so long ago that Minister Of Justice Delroy Chuck sug­gest­ed that cas­es in the sys­tem over five years with­out res­o­lu­tion be wiped from the books.
An amnesty for mur­der­ers and rapists…
At the time he made the com­ments I wrote an angry Article in which I won­dered whether Delroy Chuck was crowned King of Jamaica and there­fore had the pow­er to decree amnesty to mass mur­der­ers, rapists and oth­er dan­ger­ous crim­i­nal sim­ply because the incom­pe­tent cor­rupt court sys­tem can­not do it’s job.
This is how things gets done in Jamaica though, one per­son say some­thing and it become the way things are done. No one includ­ing Chuck both­ered to think that defense lawyers have gamed the sys­tem for years result­ing in the back­log in the sys­tem and the ulti­mate frus­tra­tion of pros­e­cu­tion witnesses.
Maybe Chuck Malahoo Forte and oth­ers before them real­ly want it this way . How can they even begin to talk about social jus­tice , human rights, civ­il rights when they allow mur­der­ers to roam the streets and kill at will?

It is that Lunacy why the so-called inves­tiga­tive agency (inde­com) sup­pos­ed­ly inves­ti­gates every police shoot­ing whether there are alle­ga­tions of impro­pri­ety or not. Too many chiefs not enough indians.
It is that brain-dead stu­pid­i­ty which caused Fred Hickling an old shrink to opine that the police could have avoid­ed killing a man alleged­ly of unsound mind who grabbed an offi­cer’s auto­mat­ic rifle and refused com­mand to drop the weapon. Hickling who has offered Psychiatric opin­ions for years stat­ed that though the man was point­ing the weapon at police they could have con­tact­ed the Hospital and avoid­ed killing him.
Clearly this jack­ass has spent too much time in the loonie bin he has him­self become a total nutcase.
Notwithstanding that idi­ot­ic com­ment there are more than enough fools who believe that that his stu­pid com­ment was a viable option for offi­cers who were star­ing down the bar­rel of that AR15.

The very notion that any­one could con­sid­er say­ing to alleged mur­der­ers you are free to go because the courts can­not get it’s act togeth­er is proof pos­i­tive these peo­ple does not care about the vic­tims of crime.
It is exact­ly sug­ges­tions like that which gives judges and defense attor­neys licence to abro­gate the process in favor of dan­ger­ous criminals.
It’s exact­ly why no politi­cian on the Island except JAG Smith has ever been impris­oned . It is exact­ly the shit with­ing the shit-stem why a politi­cian could walk free with­out even answer­ing to the charges he was arrest­ed for in a clear-cut case of pet­ty thiev­ery. In none of the dis­cus­sions about deal­ing with the present state of the courts sys­tem is the inter­est of crime vic­tims a pri­or­i­ty. What they are focused on is the amount of time it takes to get res­o­lu­tion of cas­es, a sit­u­a­tion they created.
Ironically as they lament the fact that accused crim­i­nals are forced to wait for case res­o­lu­tions they com­plete­ly ignore the trau­ma crime vic­tims feel when those who mur­der and rape their loved ones are ulti­mate­ly returned to the streets with­out pay­ing for their crimes.

Jamaica con­tin­ue to see record num­ber of mur­ders, politi­cians and police tell the pub­lic , “oh it’s most­ly peo­ple who are engaged in the lot­to scam game who are being killed” . Sure, sure , they aren’t people.
The shock­ing real­i­ty is that the mech­a­nisms in place are breed­ing crime not cur­tail­ing it.
Poor rela­tion­ship between pros­e­cu­tor’s office and police.
Chummy rela­tions between bench and bar blurs the lines, as such it’s some­times dif­fi­cult to tell whether judges are tru­ly judges or defense attorneys.
The Police as the ene­my , is not a new phe­nom­e­non, many on the bench has over sev­er­al decades used that perch to dam­age the police’s authority.

The Jamaican peo­ple are law­less , the politi­cians and opin­ion makes basi­cal­ly have shit for brains. The mur­der mad­ness can stop in a mat­ter of months.
Simply put the opin­ion­at­ed ass­holes who have some­thing to say about every damn thing need to shut the f**k up and get out the way.
The stu­pid politi­cians need to rec­og­nize that pret­ty soon they will not be able to do any­thing about the gangs oper­at­ing there.
Let the lessons of 2010 sink in for a moment , it was the secu­ri­ty forces which hand­ed Jamaica back to the shit for brain politi­cians after mer­ce­nar­ies made their pow­er known. Stop the damn talk­ing and put tough laws in place to stop this down­ward spiral.

In what is being lauded as the largest maritime drug bust in Jamaica in more than 14 years, the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s Narcotics Police and the Jamaica Defense Force allegedly intercepted a cocaine laden boat on a beach in Savanna-la-mar Westmoreland , estimated street value US$7.2 million (approximately J$1 billion).

According to Jamaican Media the The JDF report­ed that at approx­i­mate­ly 1 a.m. on Monday a United States Maritime Patrol Aircraft spot­ted a ves­sel sus­pect­ed of illic­it traf­fick­ing head­ing towards Jamaica and informed the JDF head­quar­ters. The infor­ma­tion was passed to the JDF Coast Guard, which deployed patrol ves­sels to inter­cept and appre­hend the go-fast boat. When spot­ted, the oper­a­tors of the go-fast report­ed­ly made efforts to evade cap­ture and to jet­ti­son its car­go. The JDF, along with its Jamaica Constabulary Force Narcotics Division coun­ter­parts, then launched a rapid-response deploy­ment involv­ing ele­ments of the JDF Air Wing for aer­i­al sup­port and infantry sol­diers from the First Battalion the Jamaica Regiment, who were already deployed in Westmoreland on inter­nal secu­ri­ty duties. During the pur­suit, the JDF Coast Guard fired warn­ing shots across the bow of the ves­sel in what the army described as “keep­ing with inter­na­tion­al mar­itime law enforce­ment rules of engagement”.The ves­sel was even­tu­al­ly appre­hend­ed and four men, believed to be part of the sus­pect­ed crew, were detained by the Narcotics Police who are han­dling the inves­ti­ga­tion. According to the same media report , head of the Narcotics police Senior Superintendent Calvin Small, said the men would be inter­viewed and a deci­sion made if they should be charged.

Where Are The Investigators…

To those opposed to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of drugs and it’s effects in our pop­u­la­tion the inter­cep­tion of this ship­ment is a wel­come relief. Yet the fact that no one has been appre­hend­ed with a view to get­ting to it’s Genesis is yet anoth­er fail­ing of the secu­ri­ty appa­ra­tus fol­low­ing in the pat­tern of weapons and drug finds at the wharves which results in no arrests.
The Police being aware that the way this event was pre­sent­ed to the pub­lic cre­at­ed more ques­tions than answers issued a state­ment which sought to clar­i­fy exact­ly what occurred.
According to the police’s own account­ing : A joint police/​military oper­a­tion in Belmont District, Westmoreland inter­cept­ed a ves­sel car­ry­ing 36 bales of cocaine val­ued just under $1 bil­lion (US$7.5). “Four men, who were observed aban­don­ing the ves­sel and run­ning off in dif­fer­ent direc­tions were pur­sued and tak­en into cus­tody,” a CCU spokesman had said in the release on Saturday.
However, in a lat­er release the CCU indi­cat­ed that its ini­tial report was not accu­rate. Quoting from the actu­al inci­dent report, the CCU instead said the following:
“Approximately 1:00 a.m. a joint police and mil­i­tary team, which includ­ed the Jamaica Defense Force Air Wing and Coast Guard teams inter­cept­ed a blue 28-foot ves­sel, which was spot­ted com­ing ashore at Belmont. ‘On the approach of secu­ri­ty per­son­nel to the ves­sel, men aboard the ves­sel aban­doned it and ran in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. Four men were sub­se­quent­ly held’.” The CCU also said that the four men were “duly processed” and inter­viewed in the pres­ence of their lawyer and lat­er released as inves­ti­ga­tors were rea­son­ably sat­is­fied that the evi­dence avail­able did not link the men to the seizure. The CCU says it regrets the error and any incon­ve­nience that may have been caused.

The CCU’s clar­i­fi­ca­tion in my esti­ma­tion cre­at­ed more ques­tions than answers.
If the Police’s ver­sion of events are to be believed, that they observed four men run­ning from the boats and they appre­hend­ed them, under what plau­si­ble sce­nario in law would the police be able to say they were rea­son­ably sat­is­fied that the evi­dence avail­able did not link the men to the seizure?
Did the Police in fact see the men run­ning from the boat?
Did the Police appre­hend the same men they alleged­ly saw run­ning from the boat?
Neither the ini­tial report­ing nor the fol­low-up report­ing said the police made a mis­take about the men they alleged­ly saw run­ning from the boat. Even if there were an instance of error involv­ing the iden­ti­ty of one of the men, what are the chances the police would have nabbed four men who had noth­ing to do with the cocaine haul?

How could the men arrest­ed by the police lawyer up so quick­ly, be inter­viewed and released so expe­di­tious­ly in a case of this magnitude?
Despite what appears to be some back-slap­ping by local police and even their American coun­ter­parts from media report­ing there appears to be a lot more to this cocaine bust than meets the eyes.
Whose drug ship­ment was it?
Why were the four men inter­viewed and released? Who pro­vid­ed them lawyers?
If the men were in fact on the boat there is no legal sce­nario in which they may be deemed inno­cent by the police unless they were there against their will, in which case a pro­tract­ed inves­ti­ga­tion would have to occur to deter­mine the verac­i­ty of their claim, as well as to deter­mine who was respon­si­ble. This would have made releas­ing them impos­si­ble or at best imprac­ti­cal in such short a time.
If they were not on the boat then the police is say­ing by default they unequiv­o­cal­ly lied about a major find which could have poten­tial­ly put seri­ous play­ers in jail for a long time.
The coun­try deserve to know the truth to this sto­ry which is shap­ing up to be a con­vo­lut­ed web of lies and deception.

The fact that the police is inca­pable of explain­ing how such a major drug find could result in no arrest and pos­si­ble pros­e­cu­tion leaves the pub­lic to spec­u­late as to what exact­ly occurred. If there was any covert involve­ment in the ship­ment, whether it involves Jamaica , the United States or any oth­er coun­try the Jamaican peo­ple must be made aware.
Nothing that the police has said thus far makes sense, it’s weak attempt at an expla­na­tion has once again cast the agency as an incom­pe­tent agency which can’t even explain it’s own lies.

Thepolice say they have arrest­ed and charged more than 250 peo­ple under the anti-gang law since last year, but their hard work has been frus­trat­ed as none of the cas­es have been brought to tri­al due to the heavy back­log in the courts.

“Since we’ve had the anti-gang leg­is­la­tion, we have arrest­ed over 253 per­sons. The chal­lenge we face is that [of the] 208 per­sons last year and 46 this year, none of those cas­es have gone through the courts yet. They’re all clogged up some­where in the court sys­tem,” lament­ed Deputy Commissioner of Police in charge of crime Glenmore Hinds. Hinds made the rev­e­la­tion at yesterday’s sit­ting of the Jamaica Observer Press Club which host­ed the constabulary’s top brass at the newspaper’s Beechwood Avenue head­quar­ters in Kingston. Hinds also stat­ed that he was of the view that “there is no real urgency” to pri­ori­tise these cas­es. “One of the things that we want to see done is at least for some of these cas­es to go through to set the prece­dence, and recog­nise where there are short­com­ings in the law. But until that hap­pens, we won’t see how effec­tive the law is. It’s the vol­ume; the sys­tem can­not cope,” he insisted.

The Criminal Justice (Suppression of Criminal Organisations) Bill, pop­u­lar­ly called the anti-gang law, came into effect in 2014 and forms part of the Government’s strat­e­gy to fight crime. It makes pro­vi­sion for the dis­rup­tion and sup­pres­sion of crim­i­nal organ­i­sa­tions and out­lines offences, in order to restore a sense of secu­ri­ty in the coun­try and strength­en the capac­i­ty of law enforce­ment agen­cies to effec­tive­ly deal with crime. The law also seeks to pro­hib­it peo­ple from estab­lish­ing a crim­i­nal organ­i­sa­tion; tak­ing part in, or par­tic­i­pat­ing in a crim­i­nal organ­i­sa­tion; pro­vid­ing or obtain­ing a ben­e­fit from a crim­i­nal organ­i­sa­tion; and har­bour­ing or con­ceal­ing a par­tic­i­pant in a crim­i­nal organisation.

Yesterday, Deputy Commissioner Hinds said that some 300 gangs, at max­i­mum, oper­ate island­wide, with the major­i­ty in the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s St Andrew South Division. Following close­ly, Hinds said, are the St Catherine North Division, which hous­es the country’s two main gangs – Klansman and One Order; Kingston Western Division; Kingston Eastern Division; and sec­tions of St James. Read more here :Frustrated!

The police infor­ma­tion arm, the Corporate Communications Unit (CCU), is seek­ing to explain why four men it ini­tial­ly claimed were “observed” aban­don­ing a drug-car­ry­ing ves­sel have been released from police custody.

On Saturday, the CCU said the men were detained dur­ing a joint police/​military oper­a­tion in Belmont District, Westmoreland after law enforcers inter­cept­ed the ves­sel car­ry­ing 36 bales of cocaine val­ued just under $1 bil­lion (US$7.5). “Four men, who were observed aban­don­ing the ves­sel and run­ning off in dif­fer­ent direc­tions were pur­sued and tak­en into cus­tody,” a CCU spokesman had said in the release on Saturday. However, in a release this after­noon, the CCU indi­cat­ed that its ini­tial report was not accu­rate. Quoting from the actu­al inci­dent report, the CCU instead said the fol­low­ing: “Approximately 1:00 a.m. a joint police and mil­i­tary team, which includ­ed the JamaicaDefence Force Air Wing and Coast Guard teams inter­cept­ed a blue 28-foot ves­sel, which was spot­ted com­ing ashore at Belmont. ‘On the approach of secu­ri­ty per­son­nel to the ves­sel, men aboard the ves­sel aban­doned it and ran in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. Four men were sub­se­quent­ly held’.”

The CCU also said today that the four men were “duly processed” and inter­viewed in the pres­ence of their lawyer and lat­er released as inves­ti­ga­tors were rea­son­ably sat­is­fied that the evi­dence avail­able did not link the men to the seizure. The CCU says it regrets the error and any incon­ve­nience that may have been caused. Police Explain Why Men Held After $1b Drug Bust Released